The Alpha and the Omega: Act I | Chapter 1
14 Aug 2018User1355
ACT I - CONQUESTCHAPTER 1
A new dawn rose over New Cambria. Madoc Rhys and all his supporters lay dead, victims of the swift, merciless purge that Sola Morgana had secretly orchestrated. Now the clan was no more, its people adopting for themselves her surname and moving as one to consolidate their new Matriarch’s power.
It had been easy to convince the rank-and-file of the clan’s warriors to back Sola, for she was the source of their prominence, leading as she had for years the raids against Gal-Cop’s Quirium shipments. She, and not Madoc or her warrior-mate Jyrron, had shared both the risk and the plunder with those at her side, garnering in them an almost cultlike devotion.
So too had the commoners of the clan come to worship the cunning young woman- or at least, the women and slaves. Like her they had once been nothing, playthings and broodmares for their husbands, enjoying none of the freedoms to be found in other clans- until now. Also like their Matriarch they had plied their men with honeyed words, those too stubbornly attached to the old ways spared neither the blade nor a moment’s pity. Now the fat had been cut from the muscle, and the men of Clan Morgana spoke either fealty to their Matriarch or never again.
Yet there was much work to be done. In Sola’s heart a dark ambition grew, an ambition that the name Morgana should be foremost among all the clans of Pegasi. The woman greeted the crisp chill of morning not with gladness but disdain, her eyes feasting on the beauty of her homeworld and of ended that any but her own kin laid claim to it. Her husband was still in their bedchamber, robbed of sleep from a night of tearful self-loathing at his role in Madoc’s usurpation and death. He was now a non-entity within the clan, a useless vestige of Sola’s past. Truly the Crone’s wisdom had guided their destinies.
The woman felt a tug on her hand. At her side was Arcturus, the boy barely a teenager and the first traces of manhood in his features. Yet at that moment he was less an adolescent and more a babe, craving his mother’s reassuring embrace amid the violence and mayhem.
Sola took her son into her arms, kissing his curly hair but feeling nothing that resembled af ection within herself. Both had beheld Jyrron’s anguish, the boy knowing instinctively that he would now look to his mother for guidance. Arcturus looked up, fear in his eyes.
“Am I to call myself Morgana now?”
A look that passed for compassion spread over Sola’s features. She held her son at arm’s length, impersonally yet closer than she had held his father for several years. The rising sun of New Cambria shone on them both.
“Yes,” she said. “And like your father, you will learn that power is something to be seized, not expected.”
Read the complete chapter here!